From pp-waves to Galilean spacetimes (Q6115281)

The authors exhibit all spatially homogeneous Galilean spacetimes of dimension \(n+1\ge 4\). As the definition of a Galilean spacetime is less known (e.g., the English wikipedia does not contain any article) the authors give in the introduction the definition of Galilean spacetime, which includes spacetimes which are de Sitter- Galilei, torsional de Sitter- Galilei \((-1<γ<1)\), torsional de Sitter-Galilei \((\gamma=1)\), anti de Sitter-Galilei, or torsional anti de Sitter-Galilei. In Section 2, the authors introduce some Klein pairs corresponding to homogeneous pp-wave spacetimes. In Section 3 they describe invariant Lorentzian metrics relative to the exponential coordinates. In Section 4 the authors calculate the curvature of pp-waves and prove that they are solutions of the Einstein equations sourced by a pure radiation field. Further, the authors give explicit expressions of the Killing vector fields. In Section 6 the authors discuss the null reduction along the parallel null vector and show that it gives the homogeneous Galilean spacetimes described in the introduction. Finally, in the last section, the authors show that their reduction results in non-isomorphic homogeneous Galilean spacetimes.